In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly accessible to the public. This has enabled commercial and industrial entities to explore ways that UAVs may be used to improve the services that they provide. Traditionally, UAVs include positioning systems that allow the UAV to navigate using signals received from satellites, such as global positioning system (GPS) signals transmitted from GPS satellites. These signals are weak in power and may be degraded due to natural causes (e.g., ionospheric scintillation) and shadowing caused by terrain (e.g., canyons) or structures (e.g., tall buildings). Thus, the environments in which certain commercial and industrial deployments would be desired, such as urban deployments, warehouse or factory deployments, exploratory deployments, etc., may limit the use of UAVs due to potentially poor signal conditions.
Additionally, due to the relatively weak strength of the signals from satellite based transmitters, such signals are susceptible to detrimental interference, which may include deliberate interference (e.g., spoofing) and/or inadvertent interference (e.g., jamming due to radio frequency interference). For example, it is possible to supplant the signals from the satellite based transmitters by transmitting more powerful spoofing signals that mimic authentic GPS satellite signals, thereby deceiving the UAV's positioning system with respect to the true position of the UAV. Such detrimental interference may cause the UAV to deviate from its intended flight plan, abort the flight, be hijacked (e.g., deliberately taken off course by spoofing), or even cause the UAV to crash. Thus, while UAVs provide potentially promising applications in commercial and industrial settings, techniques for navigating the UAVs may not provide sufficient reliability for the environments in which those deployments may be desired.